The United Nations goes full communist
They've been pushing Marxist Critical Pedagogy into classrooms all over the world
You may have read my previous post on how widespread woke indoctrination has become in science and education, even including subjects such as civil engineering. In all these different subjects we saw (without exception) a direct mention of famous communist-educator Paulo Freire. Not only was he simultaneously a huge fan of Mao Zedong and the most influential educator of all time but (much more importantly) he gets a regular mention on this Substack! Actually, in pretty much every article I’ve written. It’s my new mission in life to turn him into a household name.
I wrapped up this incredibly disturbing post by briefly discussing Professor Carlos Alberto Torres, former UNESCO Chair on Global Learning and Global Citizenship Education.
Carlos Alberto Torres, UCLA Distinguished Professor of Education and former UNESCO Chair on Global Learning and Global Citizenship Education (2015-19), will take part in a discussion on “When Global Citizens Face a Global Crisis: Linking Up Solutions for Deeper Change,” on Thursday, Aug. 6, 5 a.m., PST. The discussion, which is part of a “Response to COVID-19 Webinar Series,” will be transmitted via Facebook Live from Paris, presented by the UNESCO-UNAOC Media and Information Literacy and Intercultural Dialogue University Network.
Torres’ teaching and research interests include the political sociology of education, the impact of globalization on K- 12 and higher education, and the intersection of area studies, ethnic studies, and comparative international education.
Professor Torres was president of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies (WCCES) (2013-2016) and served the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES), one of the founding societies within the WCCES, through membership on the Board of Directors and as CIES President from 1994 to 1998. He is an Honorary Fellow of CIES, a Correspondent Member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and the former director of the UCLA – Latin American Institute.
Torres is the author of 70 books including “Dialogue and Educational Praxis – A Critical Reading of Paulo Freire” (São Paulo: Edições Loyola, 2014. Print), and co-editor of “Comparative Education: The Dialectic of the Global and the Local” (With R. Arnove, S. Franz, eds. 4th ed. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2013). His latest book, “The Wiley Handbook of Paulo Freire,” was published in 2019.
- UCLA School of Education and Information Studies (emphasis mine)
Carlos is the official biographer of Paulo Freire and the Founding Director of the Paulo Freire Institute in São Paulo. He’s a Paulo Freire super-fan! And obviously also a communist. Just like Freire, he’s written an awful lot of books. Freire wrote nearly 30 books of repetitive communist word-salad all named “Pedagogy of the …” (apart from one). The content of all of them combined could easily be compressed into one essay. But Carlos Torres has gone one better and written over 70 books! What’s the bet that this also could be boiled down to a few pages of actual content? I’m almost certain. In case it’s not clear why communists write so much and it’s so repetitive and poorly set out in deliberately vague, ambiguous and confusing language, it’s because it’s essentially cult scripture. They walk a fine line of clarity. It needs to be clear enough to communicate with other cult members whilst sounding totally unclear (and benign) to normal, sane people. If they just said what they meant, some sane people would notice, become alarmed and they would all get shut down in no time.
Just look at how many serious positions Carlos holds and has held. UCLA Distinguished Professor of Education, UNESCO Chair on Global Learning and Global Citizenship Education, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. They don’t just hand out those titles to anyone you know! The one I’d like to focus on today is the UNESCO position he held until recently. The acronym UNESCO stands for United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. In short, Carlos was one of the heads of the United Nation’s education department. They loved him so much that they even made a new position for him. He must be really special!
Bosio: What themes a curriculum for global citizenship should include in your opinion in order to “fit” the US context, specifically in American educational institutions?
Torres: Our teaching is intimately linked to our research, including the courses I regularly teach at UCLA and our Paulo Freire Institute-International Institute on Global Citizenship Education (PFI-IIGCE) summer programs (University of California, Los Angeles, nd). We have created a new sequence of three undergraduate courses to study the innovation in sustainability and GCE. The first course taught by Professor Richard Desjardins is entitled Globalization and Learning; the second course that I teach is entitled Global Citizenship Education; and the third course entitled Global Citizenship Education: Curriculum and Instruction is taught by Dr. Jason Dorio, a postdoctoral scholar at the UNESCO Chair under my direction and now a lecturer at UCLA. My teaching also extends to the multiple lectures I provide worldwide in the various countries we are collaborating with at the moment.
- Global citizenship education: An educational theory of the common good? A conversation with Carlos Alberto Torres, Emiliano Bosio (emphasis mine)
So this is weird. The Paulo Freire Institute, a communist organisation, promotes something called Global Citizenship Education. And the founder of this communist institute is also a communist and the UNESCO Chair on Global Learning and Global Citizenship Education. And as a higher up at the world’s most influential international organisation, he directs others to teach Global Citizenship Education. Hmm, I wonder what this could all mean?
I’ve got to say, this doesn’t sound good. But I don’t want to jump to conclusions, let’s give the UN a chance! Maybe they didn’t know he was a communist? And they somehow overlooked his well-documented and open admiration for Paulo Freire? And they didn’t really read his body of work? And they didn’t know that his actual job title included an academic discipline that’s developed by the Paulo Freire Institute? Maybe it was all just one big mistake?
About this Initiative
A call to the global community of higher education institutions
In 1964, inspiring the 1968-student revolt a couple of years later, Herbert Marcuse wrote a key text against “one dimensional man”, urging universities and campuses around the world to become places that resisted reductionism. He urged for a thinking that would show us alternatives beyond the universalizing forces of current rationalism. Universities, especially through higher education, could pave the way for human development independently of industrialized society. Giving attention to that which is not captured in the universals of one-dimensional-man, formed to serve the productive, consuming society, he created visions for alternatives. Above all, his call was to the universities and to the students in particular, as they occupy those key position outside of productive society; still on the outside but geared towards the processes of its reproduction.
- Knowledge-driven actions: transforming higher education for global sustainability, UNESCO (emphasis mine)
Well it looks like it wasn’t a mistake. This is not a good start. We haven’t even made it to the table of contents and this UNESCO document has already quoted Herbert Marcuse’s One-dimensional Man as their inspiration. For those not familiar with Herbert Marcuse, he was one of the foremost communist intellectuals of the 20th century. His book One-dimensional Man (a best-seller!) outlines how the communist project should shift from economics to culture and should get into education to indoctrinate children lest they inherit their culture from their parents or the existing society around them. In an amazing coincidence, I recently wrote about all this.
The same UNESCO document also says this.
Transformation is the red thread running through all the Sustainable Development Goals, the United Nations’ agenda for responding to global challenges facing humanity and the planet. Setting our world on a more sustainable course requires radical shifts in current development paradigms that are exacerbating inequalities and imperilling our common future. This transition is dependent on new knowledge, research and competences that only higher education institutions are in a position to provide, rooted in their historic role of service to society.
- Knowledge-driven actions: transforming higher education for global sustainability, UNESCO (emphasis mine)
I mean, come on! The red thread?! Could they make it any more obvious? I would highly recommend reading the UNESCO document or at least skimming it. It’s full of the usual bullshit communist buzzwords and woke talking points. But more importantly, you’ll quickly see that the thrust of the entire article is that every school and university should adapt every subject that they teach to promote the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Yes, really - it’s that totalitarian. No education anywhere on Earth should be out of their purview, as far as they’re concerned. These people are total megalomaniacs. In a sane world they’d all be in an asylum but in today’s clown world…they’re all running today’s clown world!
As well as reading that 100-page piece of tedious garbage, I also went to the trouble of looking through some of the authors’ other work. I suffer on your behalf! You won’t be disappointed. Take a look at this gem from Andy Stirling (among others).
Third, the production of social imaginaries is a site of political contestation in which certain visions of the future are actively marginalized and different groups’ capacity to imagine better futures systematically eroded (175). Historically, energy- and carbon-intensive actors have dominated mainstream public and media exploration of post-carbon futures (3). Where alternatives to fossil fuel–based cultures are being conceived, these are often, and necessarily, subject to (partial) democratic debate and subsequently do not offer a simple alternative trajectory (176). Indeed, issues of climate justice, racial justice, and gender equality have, until recently, too rarely been considered together and at times have been seen as competing (e.g., in relation to labor rights). This fragmentation, in a world that looks for simple stories, also drives a mistaken belief in many circles that no alternative social imaginaries are plausible or achievable. Contemporary educational establishments offer limited help in addressing this poverty of social imaginaries. Universities have systematically excluded or sidelined many knowledge traditions not associated with industrial modernity. Furthermore, a neoliberal agenda is increasingly pervading the very purpose of many universities, skewing research funding and eroding academic integrity (177). Within such a marketized and competitive structure, new social imaginaries of decarbonized futures are much less likely to emerge. In filling this vacuum, consultancies and carbon-intensive incumbents promote parochial futures with limited academic critique. Similarly, schools provide few resources to support students to interrogate and critically reflect upon the underlying narratives that shape industrial modernity; indeed, they may be better understood as active sites of their production. Attempts to disrupt this, such as critical pedagogy and Education for Sustainable Development, have been marginalized (178). As a result, young people graduate from formal education typically with little capacity to support critical analysis of dominant narratives of the future or to enable them to begin to construct new social imaginaries (179). Given the constraints above, it can be argued that the psychological, social, and emotional capacity of individuals and groups to understand, explore, and create different social imaginaries has been steadily weakened. The creative imagination of plausible and desirable futures not wedded to fossil fuels may in many cases require efforts to critique and dismantle the sociopolitical mindsets of industrial modernity and the knowledge infrastructures that support it (180). In other words, the scarcity of social imaginaries capable of conceiving plausible forms of living without dependence on fossil fuels is not just a climate change problem (181). Rather, it is intimately tied to an “epistemological monoculture” that has impoverished the collective global capacity to imagine and realize forms of living not dependent upon exploitation of people and natural “resources” (182). Yet in many communities around the world, locally rooted worldviews and endogenous interpretations of development have persisted and never been fully or even partially subjugated to increasingly globalized Western modernity (183). These in confluence with many sites of long-standing resistance and emerging counterpoint perspectives to modernization offer openings toward an enriched social imagination. In the political sphere, the building of common causes across social movements and intersectional interests, linking climate justice with, for example, gender justice and racial justice, and learning from the experiences and knowledge of indigenous communities, is intensifying and building on long traditions of imagining alternative futures
- Three Decades of Climate Mitigation: Why Haven’t We Bent the Global Emissions Curve?, Andy Stirling et al (emphasis mine)
And to think that our taxpayer money is funding this absolute crap. There’s a lot to unpack here. Firstly notice the phrase: such as critical pedagogy and Education for Sustainable Development. The second part Education for Sustainable Development was pretty much the title of the UNESCO paper. The first part Critical Pedagogy, I’m sure you remember, is the academic discipline that communist-educator Paulo Freire created (modelled on Mao Zedong). So we found Paulo again, albeit indirectly. Because of course we did. We always do!
It should be pretty obvious by now that Education for Sustainable Development or Global Citizenship Education are just United Nations speak for Critical Pedagogy. In other words for communist indoctrination. There’s nothing like a re-branding to help promote a terrible idea.
Secondly notice the aesthetic and style of the writing. Doesn’t this remind you of some of the other communist literature I’ve quoted? The vague, repetitive word-salad that sounds a lot like cult scripture. Critically reflect? Forms of living? Social imaginaries? I mean, what the hell are they talking about? Well, as usual it’s communist code for being indoctrinated into the communist perspective. Social imaginaries is the biggest giveaway since social constructivism is the foundational belief of communism. Communists are always banging on about imaginings, imaginaries, imaginations and other made-up variations of the word imagine.
Paulo represented for those of us who are committed to imagine a world, in his own words, that is less ugly, more beautiful, less discriminatory, more democratic, less dehumanizing, and more humane.
- Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (preface (emphasis mine)
Thirdly notice the phrase: linking climate justice with, for example, gender justice and racial justice, and learning from the experiences and knowledge of indigenous communities. This is your bog-standard intersectional worldview. The solidarity movement described by Herbert Marcuse (the same one from the UNESCO document) in his 1969 Essay on Liberation.
Let’s recap. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) promotes communist education that’s based on Paulo Freire’s Critical Pedagogy. It’s been re-branded to Global Citizenship Education or Education for Sustainable Development but it’s the same insidious communist indoctrination by a different name. UNESCO is highly influential around the world and pushes this Critical Pedagogy into schools and universities around the world. Our education systems have been hijacked and are being used to indoctrinate the next generation of children and the adults they become and this is largely a result of efforts by the UN. The United Nations is a communist organisation and needs to be disbanded.